Author: Catherine Marshall

As the week progressed and the temperature headed beyond 40 degrees, my vigour flagged like that molten candlestick. I longed to return to the chill of Ulan-Ude, where our eyelashes froze to white feathers and the snowflakes fell in limpid perfection and the cold shook us so viscerally, so expansively, from our spiritual slumber.

How delightful to see this country's mosques suffused with the scent of frankincense — not just on celebratory days, but always. And what a surprise it is to find that this place in whose proximity Christianity unfolded smells exactly — precisely — like Christmas.

Something strange happens to the vote after it's been gifted to us. It's the most valuable thing when we don't possess it, and the most disposable when we do. Millions of Americans discovered this when a minority of voters who showed up to the polls in 2016 managed to elect that improbable candidate, Donald Trump.

Where many saw a woman smearing the name of an upstanding member of the legal fraternity, others saw a successful professional putting her reputation on the line to expose the harm done by a man being considered for one of the country's highest offices. Her allegations are believable to us precisely because they are so common.

In the 17 years since, farm murders have dropped dramatically. At face value, this is a triumph in the fight against violent crime, and a resounding riposte to people like President Donald Trump and our own Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott, who have seized on the issue in order to sow racial hatred among their own constituents.

The earthworms and bees were the first to know, wrote Nobel laureate and Belarusian native Svetlana Alexievich. The bees stayed in their hives; the worms buried themselves so deep that fishermen digging for bait on the banks of the Pripyat River were perplexed that they couldn't find any. The humans were slower to learn.

Today my niece would have turned 16. It would have been a milestone, the teetering point between childhood and maturity. But there was something more formidable facing her, something none of us was aware of. So unbearable and obliterating was it, it would prompt her to end her life just three months after her 15th birthday.

Who wants wi-fi up in the air anyway? Until the recent arrival of in-flight internet connectivity, flights presented one with a rare opportunity to escape real life and forget it ever existed. This, after all, is the reward for a long, uncomfortable flight: precious time. At least, it used to be.

We're about to land, but I don't know where I'm going. The landscape spread below me is a tableau of muddy waters and tin-roofed houses poking out from palm groves. I thought I'd be flying direct to Paro, in Bhutan, but discovered once airborne that this Royal Bhutan Airways flight would be landing first at a place I'd never heard of.

The repository of a superfluity of victims' faces and their heartbreaking stories leaves visitors questioning how it is possible for a country to turn on its own people like that. Why do humans turn into killing machines at the behest of their leaders, and when will we allow it to happen again?

While the female-led outcry continues, those men benefitting from the imbalance ought to question their privilege. Instead of carrying sympathetic white roses into the Oscars, they should use the opportunity to question their own complicity in accepting roles in movies where women are inadequately represented.